ENID BAGNOLD

(1889-1981)

Bagnold was an art student until she became a VAD during the war. Her ADiary Without Dates, from which this excerpt is taken, caused her to be firedfrom the hospital in which she was working. In her preface to the 1935 editionof the book, she claims to have written it at the age of nineteen, perhapsin order to heighten the impression of the narrator's naivete. She was infact twenty-nine. Bagnold went on to enjoy a distinguished career as a novelist and is perhaps best known for her children's book, National Velvet.

I suffer awfully from my language in this ward. I seem to be the only VAD' nurse of whom they continually ask, 'What say, nurse?' It isn't that I use long words, but my sentences seem to be inverted.
An opportunity for learning to speak simple Saxon ...
'An antitetanic injection for Corrigan,' said Sister.2 And I went to the dispensary to fetch the syringe and the needles.
'But has he any symptoms?' I asked. In a Tommies'3 ward one dare ask anything; there isn't that mystery which used to surround the officers' illnesses.
'Oh, no,' she said, 'it's just that he hasn't had his full amount in France.'
So I hunted up the spirit-lamp 4 and we prepared it, talking of it.
But we forget to talk of it to Corrigan. The needle was into his shoulder before he knew why his shirt was held up.

His wrath came like an avalanche; the discipline of two years was forgotten, his Irish tongue was loosened. Sister shrugged her shouldersand laughed; I listened to him as I cleaned the syringe.

I gathered that it was the indignity that had shocked his sense of lindividual pride. 'Treating me like a cow ...' I heard him say to Smiff - who laughed, since it wasn't his shoulder that carried the serum

1 Voluntary Aid Detachment, a volunteer corps of non-professional nurses' aides.
2 A nursing sister; i.e. a registered nurse, not a religious sister. VAD's were addressed as 'nurse'.
3 Enlisted men, as opposed to officers.
4 To disinfect the needle.

Enid Bagnold

Smiff laughed: he has been in hospital nine months, and his theoryis that a Sister may do anything at any moment; his theory is thatnothing does any good - that if you don't fuss you don't get worse. Corrigan was angry all day; the idea that 'a bloomin' woman should come an' shove something into me system' was too much for him.But he forgets himself: there are no individuals now; his 'system' belongs to us.

Sister said, laughing, to Smiff the other day, 'Your leg is mine.
''Wrong again; it's the Governmint's!' said Smiff. But Corrigan isIrish and doesn't like that joke.

There are times when my heart fails me; when my eyes, my ears,my tongue, and my understanding fail me; when pain means nothing to me...

In the bus yesterday, I came down from London sitting beside aSister from another ward, who held her hand to her ear and shifted in her seat.

She told me she had earache and we didn't talk, and I sat huddled in my corner and watched the names of the shops, thinking, as I was more or less forced to do by her movements, of her earache.What struck me was her own angry bewilderment before the fact of her pain. 'But it hurts ... You've no idea how it hurts!' She was surprised.

Many times a day she hears the words, 'Sister, you're hurtin' me... Couldn't you shift my heel? It's like a toothache,' and other similar sentences. I hear them in our ward all the time. One can't pass down the ward without some such request falling on one's ears.

She is astonished at her earache; she is astonished at what pain can be; it is unexpected. She is ready to be angry with herself, with her pain, with her ear. It is monstrous ... she thinks.

The pain of one creature cannot continue to have a meaning for another. It is almost impossible to nurse a man well whose pain you do not imagine. A deadlock!
One has illuminations all the time!

There is an old lady who visits in our ward, at whom, for one or two unimportant reasons, it is the custom to laugh. The men, who fall in with our moods with a docility which I am beginning to suspectis a mask, admit too that she is comic.

This afternoon, when she was sitting by Corrigan's bed and talkingto him I saw where her treatment of him differed from ours. She treats him as though he were an individual; but there is more in it than that... She treats him as though he had a wife and children, a house and

A Diary Without Dates

a back garden and responsibilities: in some manner she treats him asthough he had dignity.

I thought of yesterday's injection. That is the difference: that iswhat the Sisters mean when they say 'the boys.'

* * *

It was the first time I had a man sing at his dressing. I was standing at the sterilizer when Rees's song began to mount over the screen thathid him from me. ('Whatever is that?' 'Rees's tubes going in.')

It was like this: 'Ah ... ee ... oo. Sister!' and again: 'Sister ... oo ... ee... ah!' Then a little scream and his song again.

I heard her voice: 'Now then, Rees, I don't call that much of a song.' She called me to make his bed, and I saw his left ear was full of tears.

O visitors, who come into the ward in the calm of the long afternoon,when the beds are neat and clean and the flowers out on the tables and the VAD's sit sewing at splints and sandbags, when the men look like men again and smoke and talk and read ... if you could see whatlies beneath the dressings!

When one shoots at a wooden figure it makes a hole. When one shoots at a man it makes a hole, and the doctor must make seven others.

I heard a blackbird sing in the middle of the night last night - two bars, and then another. I thought at first it might be a burglar whistlingto his mate in the black and rustling garden.
But it was a blackbird in a nightmare.
Those distant guns again tonight... 5
Now a lull and now a bombardment; again a lull, and then batter,batter, and the windows. Is the lull when they go over the top?

I can only think of death tonight. I tried to think just now, 'What is it, after all! Death comes anyway; this only hastens it.' But that won'tdo; no philosophy helps the pain of death. It is pity, pity, pity, that I feel, and sometimes a sort of shame that I am here to write at all.

Summer... Can it be summer through whose hot air the guns shakeand tremble? The honeysuckle, whose little stalks twinkled and shone that January night, has broken at each woody end into its crumbled flower.

Where are the frost, the snow? ... Where are the dead?

5 The sound of a bombardment at the Front, which could be heard in England.

Where are my trouble and my longing, and the other troubles, and the happiness in other summers?

Alas, the long history of life! There is that in death that makes the throat contract and the heart catch: everything is written in water.
We talk of tablets to the dead, there can be none but in the heart, and the heart fades.